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Feb. 17: Updates on Middle East Protests

By Robert Mackey February 17, 2011 8:21 amFebruary 17, 2011 8:21 am

On Thursday, The Lede continues to follow protest movements in Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, Iran, Iraq and Egypt. Updates below mix alerts on breaking news with reports from bloggers and journalists on the ground. A stream of Twitter messages on the protests is in this blog’s right column.

This video report from Britain’s Channel 4 News uses several of the YouTube clips we saw posted online from Bahrain earlier in the day to give an overview of what happened, and asks if the deadly raid on the protest camp will end the uprising or add fuel to it:

This dramatic and disturbing video report from Al Jazeera English includes graphic images from the hospital in Manama, the Bahraini capital, and the outrage and grief of medical staff there who treated the protesters killed or wounded during the assault by the security forces.

The Al Jazeera report includes an interview with Dr. Sadiq Ekri, who was beaten by the security forces during the deadly raid, and also spoke to Times Op-Ed columnist Nicholas Kristof about what happened to him.

The Lede will return on Friday to continue following the protest movements in North Africa and the Middle East. In the meantime, please visit the New York Times homepage for any developments and to read articles by my colleagues in the region.

An Iranian opposition Web site reported on Thursday that the brother of an art student who was killed during a protest in Tehran on Monday has been arrested.

As The Lede reported on Wednesday, Iran’s government denied that the the student killed during the protest, Saane Zhaleh, was a protester and prevented his friends and classmates from attending a state-sanctioned funeral that lauded him as a regime supporter.

On Wednesday the dead man’s brother, Ghaane, reportedly told Voice of America that his brother was not, as Iran’s government claimed, a member of the Basij youth militia that supports the regime. He also said that the dead student’s family had been tricked into providing the authorities with a photograph of him that was then used to forge a Basij membership card in his name.

The opposition Web site reported that Ghaane Zhaleh was arrested because of the interview.

As The Times reports elsewhere on this site, the daughters of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the leading reformist candidate in Iran’s disputed 2009 presidential election, told an opposition Web site on Thursday that “they have had no word from either of their parents since Tuesday and feared they had been detained. Security forces have surrounded their home, and all communications have been cut.”

As a Lede reader pointed out earlier today, supporters of Iran’s opposition Green movement are also mourning the death of a second young man who was killed on Monday during protests. A Facebook tribute page for that man, Mohammad Mokhtari. They are also passing around screenshots of one of the last updates the young man posted on his Facebook page, which read: “Oh God, please let me die standing, for I am weary of sitting while living in oppression.”

Another of Mr. Mokhtari’s final updates on Facebook was a link to this video of Isabella Rossellini reading a letter from Jafar Panahi, the detained Iranian filmmaker, at the Berlin Film Festival last week:

Egypt’s new government has arrested three former ministers and a businessman who was close to one of former President Hosni Mubarak’s sons on corruption charges, The BBC reports.

The four men placed under 15-day detention and banned from traveling abroad after their release are the former interior minister, Habib el-Adly, the former the housing minister, Ahmed Maghrabi, the former tourism minister Zuheir Garana, and Ahmed Ezz, a steel tycoon and ruling party insider, a judicial source told The BBC. All four man have denied any wrongdoing.

As my colleagues Kareem Fahim, Michael Slackman and David Rohde reported two weeks ago, Mr. Ezz was a close friend and confidant of Mr. Mubarak’s son Gamal. They added:

For many years, Mr. Ezz has represented the intersection of money, politics and power, controlling two-thirds of the steel market, leading the budget committee as a member of Parliament and serving as an officer and loyal lieutenant in the governing party. Public resentment at the wealth acquired by the politically powerful helped propel the uprising already reshaping the contours of power along the Nile.

Mr. Ezz’s world has come undone. He is treated as a liability by an old guard intent on saving itself from fed-up and furious protesters. He is under investigation on suspicion of corruption. His assets have been frozen and his right to travel taken away. He has denied accusations of corruption in the past, and his location was not known Sunday. Now his name is part of the derisive chants in Tahrir Square, a symbol of all that was wrong with Mr. Mubarak’s government.

“Ahmed Ezz sucks the blood of the people,” said Osama Mohamed Afifi, a student who joined the protesters in the square on Sunday. “He is the only man who can sell steel in all of Egypt, and he sells it for much more than if we could buy steel from someone else like China.”

Earlier this week, Issandr El Amrani, a Moroccan-American journalist, wrote on his blog The Arabist: “Probably the most shared link right now is the above video of Ahmed Ezz, billionaire steel magnate and Gamal Mubarak’s right-hand man, playing the drums in his band in 1987. As Hosni Mubarak said, once too they were young.”

According to the blog Syria News Wire, a demonstration in Damascus, the Syrian capital, on Thursday, caught on video posted on YouTube, was not part of a wave of antigovernment unrest sweeping the Arab world.

The blog, which is written from Damascus and London, explains the video this way:

An unprecedented scene in Syria this morning as an estimated 1500 people took to the streets in a spontaneous protest.

They were angry that the son of a shop owner had been allegedly beaten by a traffic police officer. So they went on to the streets at Hariqa, just south of Souq Al-Hamidiyah in Damascus. From the video, it seems as if the protest spread down to the western end of Medhat Pasha.

They chant “the Syrian people will not be humiliated”, interspersed with, “shame, shame” and “with our soul, with our blood, we sacrifice for you Bashar”. That’s a very Syrian way of saying they were furious at the police, not the president. Also, note there was no chanting of “the people want the fall of the regime” (the words used in Tunisia and Egypt, and now in Yemen and Bahrain).

At the start of the video, almost every person in is holding up a mobile phone. With mobile phone video cameras plus Twitter and blogs to distribute the footage, public servants face a degree of accountability that they have never faced before.

In a surreal moment, the Minister of the Interior arrives and asks the crowd why they are demonstrating. He has now promised an investigation.

Another Syrian blogger, a student in Aleppo who writes on Twitter as Seleucid, called the video of the protest “proof that the Syrians can do it as much as anybody, they just don’t want to.”

This video and commentary from the Syrian blogosphere comes just three days after a teenage blogger, brought into court chained and blindfolded, was sentenced to five years in jail by a court in Syria. As Reuters reported, the blogger, “Tal al-Molouhi, a high school student who has been under arrest since 2009 and is now 19, had written articles saying she yearned for a role in shaping the future of Syria and supporting the Palestinian cause. Lawyers said the judge gave no evidence or details as to why she had been charged.”

This raw video of protesters outside the main hospital in Bahrain’s capital on Thursday, was posted on YouTube by Al Jazeera English:

My colleague Michael Slackman reported from the hospital:

In the morning, there were three bodies already stretched out on metal tables in the morgue at Salmaniya Medical Complex: Ali Mansour Ahmed Khudair, 53, dead, with 91 pellets pulled from his chest and side; Isa Abd Hassan, 55, dead, his head split in half; Mahmoud Makki Abutaki, 22, dead, 200 pellets of birdshot pulled from his chest and arms.

Doctors said that at least two others had died and that several patients were in critical condition with serious wounds. Muhammad al-Maskati, of the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights, said that he had received at least 20 calls from frantic parents searching for young children lost in the chaos of the attack.

A surgeon, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals, said that for hours on Thursday the Health Ministry prevented ambulances even from going to the scene to aid victims. The doctor said that in the early morning, when the assault was still under way, police officers beat a paramedic and a doctor and refused to allow medical staff to attend to the injured.

“They refused to let ambulances into the roundabout to help the injured,” the doctor said.

News outlets in Bahrain reported that the health minister, Faisal al-Hamar, resigned after doctors staged a demonstration to protest his order barring ambulances from going to the square.

Bahrain’s security forces attacked the funeral of the first protester to be killed this week, killing a second man. The authorities will now have to decide how to deal with at least five more funerals on Friday.

As my colleague Alan Cowell reports, restrictions on independent reporting inside Libya make it difficult to evaluate how opponents of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, responded to calls to protest on Thursday.

But opposition activists, like the bloggers who write the EnoughGaddafiand ShababLibya Twitter feed, have posted links to a number of video clips uploaded to Facebook and YouTube on Thursday that are said to show protests and clashes with the security forces

This video report from Al Jazeera includes some of that footage, and video from Libyan state television of the officially-sanctioned demonstrations in support of Colonel Qaddafi on Thursday:

The Enough Gaddafi bloggers report that their Web site has been hacked and is down, so they are collecting reports and video of protests on a new site, Libyafeb17.com. The EnoughGaddafi YouTube channel includes this video (which contains graphic images) of what they describe as a peaceful demonstrator who was shot and killed by the security forces in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, on Thursday:

The same bloggers also posted this graphic video, said to show a man shot during a protest in the eastern Libyan town of Derna on Thursday:

They also point to this clips, said to show protesters in Tobruck chanting the slogan that has rung out across the Arab world in recent weeks: “the people demand the fall of the regime.”

The Shabab Libya bloggers, who describe themselves on Twitter as “a group of Libyan Youth both in and out of Libya… inspired by our brothers in Egypt,” posted a link to this bloody clip, said to show a man in Banghazi bleeding after being shot in the arm:

Another YouTube channel, ibnomar2005, features this video, said to have been shot in Benghazi on Thursday night:

The same channel also includes these two clips, said to show protesters on the streets of Libya’s capital, Tripoloi, on Thursday:

This clip, posted on Facebook and then YouTube on Thursday, is said to show protesters in the city of Zentan, southwest of the capital, chanting: “To hell with Qaddafi! Oh Zentan, don’t be afraid anymore.”

As my colleagues Michael Schmidt and Duraid Adnan report, Iraqi officials said that private security guards in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya fired on a group of protesters who tried to storm the political offices of the region’s leader.

After protesters threw rocks at the headquarters of the political party headed by the president of the semiautonomous Kurdish region, Massoud Barzani, security guards opened fire. Law enforcement officials initially said five people were killed, but the head of the health department there later said that only one person had died.

This video was uploaded to YouTube on Thursday by a video blogger who said that it showed the shooting after protesters attacked the building:

This video, also uploaded to YouTube on Thursday, is said to show a more peaceful part of the protest in Sulaimaniya:

My colleague Laura Kasinof reports from Yemen’s capital, Sana, “thousands of demonstrators, some supporting President Ali Abdullah Saleh and some seeking his downfall, clashed for hours in central Sana, bombarding one another with a hailstorm of rocks on the seventh straight day of violent unrest here.”

From the opinion section of this Web site, here is a new video report by Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times Op-Ed columnist who visited the hospital in Bahrain’s capital, Manama, where wounded and dead protesters were brought after the pre-dawn raid (warning: the report includes graphic images from the hospital’s morgue):

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters in Washington on Thursday that President Obama’s “view is that we oppose the use of violence by the government of Bahrain just as we oppose the use of violence by other governments in the region against peaceful protesters.”

Mr. Carney added: “We offer condolences to the families of those who were killed and injured. We’ve said repeatedly that violence, the United States believes strongly that violence is not an appropriate reaction when the peoples of this region, or any region, are peacefully protesting, airing their grievances and making reasonable demands about wanting to engage in the political process. We believe that people have universal rights, including the right to peaceful assembly. So we continue to urge the government of Bahrain to show restraint in responding to peaceful protests.”

My colleague Mark Landler reports from Washington on other aspects of the American government’s response to the crackdown in Bahrain:

For the second time in two weeks violence has broken out in a restive Arab ally of the United States, confronting the Obama administration with the question of how harshly to condemn a friendly leader who is resisting street protests against his regime.

This time it is Bahrain, a postage-stamp monarchy in the Persian Gulf, where the United States Navy bases its Fifth Fleet. At least five people were killed early Thursday when heavily armed riot police officers fired shotguns and concussion grenades into a crowd occupying a traffic circle in the capital, Manama.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Bahrain’s foreign minister, Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, on Thursday to “express deep concern about recent events,” a State Department official said. Mrs. Clinton urged “restraint moving forward” and pushed Sheik Khalid, a member of the royal family that rules Bahrain, to speed up a program of political and economic reforms.

But President Obama has yet to issue the blunt public criticism of Bahrain’s rulers that he eventually leveled against President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt — or that he has repeatedly aimed at the mullahs in Iran.

For his part, Bahrain’s foreign minister, who had been actively using his khalidalkhalifa Twitter feed in recent days to argue that “this is no peaceful protest,” had nothing to say about the police raid on Thursday to other users of the social network in Bahrain, beyond urging them to watch the state television report embedded in our 12:17 p.m. update.

Speaking to reporters after meeting with his Gulf counterparts on Thursday, the foreign minister did call the violence “regrettable,” The Associated Press reported. He also blamed the protesters for “polarizing the country” and pushing it to the “brink of the sectarian abyss.”

According to an NPR report, Mr. Al-Khalifa also called the protests a “rebellion against the government and against the nation” and said the raid had preserved the “people’s right to express themselves.”

Miguel Marquez, an ABC News reporter, was beaten by Bahrain’s security forces as he recorded an audio report on the deadly raid on the protesters in the Pearl Roundabout shortly after 3 a.m. on Thursday morning. Here is his report:

As Sultan Al Qassemi, a columnist for The National, a newspaper in Abu Dhabi, reported earlier on Twitter, Bahraini state television broadcast a graphic video report at about 3 p.m. local time that cast the protesters as armed Islamist militants who attacked police officers.

This video of the very graphic report, which includes gory images said to show wounded members of Bahrain’s security forces in the hospital – one with severed fingers and another undergoing an operation – was posted on YouTube a short time ago:

The report also shows images of what a spokesman for Bahrain’s interior ministry said were knives, swords and a gun the protesters were armed with.

In his description of the video report, Mr. Qassemi wrote that although the interior ministry spokesman said, “You can see on TV swords and weapons and flags of Hezbollah,” no Hezbollah flags were shown.

He added: “Bahrain TV did not show images of the injured protesters.”

Despite a crackdown on reporting, supporters of the protests have managed to post images and video of protesters who were wounded or killed online. There are shocking images on this Facebook page

This YouTube video shows an enraged crowd outside the hospital where victims were brought on Thursday morning chanting for the end of the regime:

This video, apparently shot inside the hospital, is said to show members of the medical taff at the Manama hospital also chanting “The people demand the fall of the regime.”

Amnesty International has called on Bahrain’s government to explain why it used force on Thursday against what numerous independent reporters had described as a peaceful gathering of protesters in the capital, Manama.

Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa director said Bahrain should “carry out a full, impartial investigation into the force used this morning against peaceful protesters, including families with children, and whether the use of deadly force was justified. If not, those who gave the orders and used excessive force must be brought to justice.”

Maryam Alkhawaja, an activist with the Bahrain Center for Human Rights who was at the camp when the security forces moved in, and described it in real time on her Twitter feed, has asked Bahrain’s interior ministry to produce some evidence that the protesters were armed, as the authorities have claimed.

Raw video from The Associated Press shows Bahrain’s capital, Manama, soon after security forces launched a deadly attack on a protest camp at about 3 a.m. on Thursday.

After Bahrain’s security forces launched a deadly raid on sleeping protesters in the capital, Manama, in the early hours on Thursday morning, the government apparently made an effort to keep its crackdown from being reported.

CNN reported on Thursday morning that its correspondent in Manama, Nic Robertson, was forced to use his iPhone to shoot video after his camera equipment was confiscated at the airport. The broadcaster has also relied heavily today on the same video clips uploaded to YouTube by bloggers in Bahrain we embedded lower down in this post.

After his equipment was taken, Mr. Roberston filed this cellphone video report from the hospital in Manama where the wounded and the dead were taken after the attack on the protest camp:

Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times Op-Ed columnist who is also in Manama, complained about the effort to suppress reporting in a series of updates to his Twitter feed.

After noting reports that journalists are being blocked from entering Bahrain, Mr. Kristof wrote on Twitter: “those of us journalists already in Bahrain WILL bear witness!”

Mr. Kristof then posted a series of updates on the social network with information based on his interviews at the hospital in Manama where victims of the attack were taken. In one he wrote: “Nurse told me she saw handcuffed prisoner beaten by police, then executed with gun.”

Mr. Kristof’s description of the events in Bahrain has drawn a furious response on Twitter from a member of Bahrain’s royal family, Ali Bin Khalifa. On his alibinkhalifa Twitter feed the royal accused Mr. Kristof of being “emotional” and “supporting outlaws with weapons.”

To be clear, Mr. Kristof is no longer a news reporter for The Times but an Op-Ed columnist who writes for the news organization’s opinion section. A former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent, Mr. Kristof’s opinion columns are often based on his own reporting in the countries he writes about. The name of his blog, “On the Ground,” reflects that approach.

Noting the royal’s Twitter attacks on his integrity, and the suggestion that the protesters were armed Islamic radicals, Mr. Kristof called the broadsides an example of Bahraini government “propaganda.”

These two video clips of what was, about 13 hours ago, a protest site in Bahrain’s capital, Manama, were posted on YouTube by a blogger who said they were shot at 3:30 p.m. local time in Bahrain, with this description: “The Pearl Roundabout – 12 hours after the big clear out: Almost back to normal following the eviction of protesters from Lulu Roundabout. Even the graffiti has been painted over.”

The same video blogger also uploaded these brief clips to his YouTube channel earlier on Thursday, showing armored personnel carriers and tanks arriving in the area on Thursday morning, hours after the deadly raid on the protesters:

Maryam Alkhawaja, via YfrogA photograph of protesters fleeing clouds of teargas fired by the security forces in Bahrain sent to the Web from a human rights activist’s phone shortly after 3 a.m. on Thursday morning.

As Maryam Alkhawaja, an activist with the Bahrain Center for Human Rights reported on her Twitter feed between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. local time, a protest camp in Bahrain’s capital, Manama, was cleared by security forces firing teargas at sleeping protesters.

My colleagues Michael Slackman and Nadim Audi report from Manama, “At least five people died, some of them reportedly killed in their sleep with scores of shotgun pellets to the face and chest, according to a witness and three doctors who received the dead and at least 200 wounded at a hospital here.”

Several video clips of the attack on the protesters camped out in Manama’s Pearl Roundabout have been posted online.

This clip, which appears to show the start of the attack from the protest camp, was posted on YouTube by a video blogger who seemed to indicate that it was filmed at 3:26 a.m. local time on Thursday:

These two video clips, which seem to show the same scene minutes later filmed from a nearby building, were uploaded to YouTube by a blogger who commented: “The police put an end to the peaceful protest at the Lulu Roundabout with tear gas and sound bombs.”

These two clips give a ground-level view of people streaming out of the camp during the attack:

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